Retail + Digital

Monthly Archives: January 2014

Conveniently choosing Tokyo to test the market for its new retail brand, Kate Spade Saturday mixes a physical store environment with digital point of sale (POS). The new concept store encourages customers to interact with the brand aimed at a younger, more casual fashionista customer, perfect for Japan.

Kate Spade Saturday’s interactive POS is created for customers to dip into related digital merchandise content on iPads dotted around the store. The tablets are unbranded and blend seamlessly into the fixtures or appear as stand alone displays next to featured mannequins. The content featured on the tablets is designed to be changed frequently and is connected to the brand’s social media channels. Kate Spade’s strategy for the new retail brand is to drop unique weekly products exclusively available at the Tokyo flagship – driving millennial shoppers into the store to check out what’s new each week (on Saturdays). While they are there they can browse social media, linger over look books and watch videos of styling tips via the multiple tablets or hang around in the café to catch up with friends over a coffee.

Osaka is the next store to open in Japan, where over the next year, there will be a total of five locations plus US and Japanese e-commerce sites.

The new digital strategy was created by design agency Control Group and replaces Kate Spade’s out-of-date analogue POS system that would have been too slow and too expensive for the weekly product focus, not to mention out of synch with the brand’s digitally savvy shoppers.

“All businesses need to learn, starting with the minimum viable product, getting it into the hands of consumers, seeing how people react to it, and paying attention to what users want is the biggest success of this campaign,” Colin O’Donnell, a partner at Control Group, told FastCo Design. “The signage is a great, beautiful product. But for me, it’s amazing to see an organization embrace that lean startup technology.”

The tablets allow Kate Spade to test branded content quickly and efficiently, the developers can also get reactions to product drops in time to be able to update collections, deal with fulfillment across the store portfolio and hone brand messages or in-store offers. At all times the POS content engages shoppers on the shop floor right next to the product, it’s a physical-digital hybrid experience that means a weekly trip to the store, driving much needed footfall.

Kate Spade’s new Saturday retail concept was created as a physical-digital entity from the word go. It’s aimed at millennials who shop across channels and like their store environments to cater to their every smart-device driven whim. By designing the POS to be integrated into the store fixtures and enabling a store-wide software platform that staff can update with related content and even with some purchasing analytics thrown into the mix, it’s future retail planning at its best. Control Group is a leading design and tech firm leading the way in experiential store design, for more read an interview with Paul McConnell, the firm’s director of product design.

by retail_plannerMenswear gets phygital here at @mrporterlive X @clubmonaco with an early #LCM soirée celebrating the arts of grooming, style & media at the new Club Monaco boutique #effortless #cobranding